Man's 400 Minutes In Dell Hell Could Cost Them Millions

By pissing off this one customer, Dell may have lost millions of dollars. Bill is a corporate account holder and a consultant who makes recommendations to Fortune 500 companies on how to spend their IT money. Usually he recommends Dell, but after his trip to Dell Hell, that will no longer be the case.

He ordered a laptop from Dell for his business and it was dead on arrival. After lots of typical back and forth with typically incompetent Indian customer service reps – though one notable moment was when the tech screamed “NO!” and hung up the phone when Bill asked to speak to a manager – he finally got his replacement approved and he shipped it out via FedEx.

That’s at the 340th minute mark – he blogged a log of all of his calls and interactions – and that’s where it gets really fun.

When he tries to get Dell to refund the Fedex cost they were supposed to pay for, they tell him it’s up to him to dispute the charge with Fedex. When he asks to speak to a manager about his entire ordeal, he’s put “on hold,” which is just 5 minutes of silence. When he says, “I’m not hanging up,” the woman picks up immediately and says, “Oh, can you hear me now?” Then when she transfers Bill to a “manager,” it sounds like it’s just her again pretending to be the manager!

He got his refund but Bill had had it. He wrote up the entire incident on his blog, punctuated by this coda: “Dell, you really screwed up on this one. Not only is my company a decent spender, I make recommendations to Fortune 500 companies on a regular basis on the best way to allocate their I.T. expenditures. You cannot possibly expect me to recommend you to anyone in the future – this mistake may in fact cost you millions.”

That should wipe a decent chunk of the savings Dell thinks it’s getting by outsourcing its customer service to India.

Bill says he also tweeted his problem to various “DellCares” and “DellListens” accounts but was ignored. One of our readers recently had luck with his Dell issue after messaging Dell community forum moderators and emailing Michael Dell. After a certain point you have to stop using the “official channel” and switch over to the channels that get you results.